GOTHAM; That Comeback Trail for the Economy? Here, It's Littered With Foreclosures

By MICHAEL POWELL

Published: February 7, 2012

To walk 145th Street in South Jamaica, past red-brick homes with metal awnings and chain-link fences, is to find a storm of immense destructive power still raging.

Three years ago, when I wandered this block south of Linden Boulevard in Queens, banks had foreclosed on eight homes. In the years since, banks have filed notice against a half-dozen more owners. Some of those homes sit abandoned, plywood boards nailed across doors and windows, as if to guard against further spread of this plague.

We are accustomed to hearing politicians talk of a halting recovery from the recession. They detect heartbeats in the job market and flickers of life in house sales. New York and New Jersey, our governors proclaim, are on the comeback trail.

Not here.

A dozen miles from Midtown Manhattan, the foreclosure belt stretches across the heart of black homeownership in this city, from Canarsie and East New York in Brooklyn, to Springfield Gardens and St. Albans, Queens, where Fats Waller, Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald once owned handsome Tudor-style homes.

Black Americans came late to homeownership for reasons deeply rooted in our tragic racial history. Black New Yorkers making more than $68,000 are nearly five times as likely to hold high-interest mortgages as whites of similar income, and their default rates are much higher. Now a generation watches as its housing wealth is vaporized.

Organizers with the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project pored over 2011 mortgage default data. They found that 345,000 city mortgages were in default or delinquent last year. In corners of southeast Queens, banks filed as many as 150 delinquency notes for every 1,000 housing units.

Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman says that statewide the number of New Yorkers at risk of losing homes exceeds the population of Buffalo, Syracuse and Rochester combined.

In Jamaica, ''for sale'' signs sit two, three and four to a block. Real estate agents resemble fishermen who've kept lines in the water too long. Of late, matters have grown worse. The federal government has stopped paying counselors and lawyers for those at risk of foreclosure, and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who takes pride in his reinvention as a fiscal conservative, has declined to foot the bill.

I stop Randy Ali, a Guyanese ironworker, as he tinkers with his S.U.V. on 145th Street. Which is his house? He nods at a two-story brick home. ''I paid $360,000.'' He gives a mournful nod. ''I just got a notice from the city that it's valued at $215,000.''

He looks embarrassed. How could he foresee a housing collapse this huge? ''You have a family, you want a place to live.'' Pause. ''Do I walk away?''

Say this much: New Yorkers are better off than those who live in the acres of foreclosed homes in the deserts around Phoenix and Las Vegas. Our politicians are not always an inspiring lot, but New York has a social democratic tradition, and they wove a safety net.

Banks must submit to months of mediation before foreclosing, and lawyers must attest that the bank can prove ownership. Judges here show waning patience for the three-card monte act of some banks.

Just a few weeks ago, the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court took the unusual step of ruling that Bank of America could not foreclose on an Orange County home of a New York City police officer. The judges upheld a lower court ruling that the bank's ''conduct was nothing short of appalling.''

Still, the fevers rage on.

On Friday, I stepped off the elevator in State Supreme Court in Queens. Shafts of sun poured across the marble floor, as dozens of men and women sat in shadow, awaiting mediation.

A computer list is taped to the wooden door frame. Every foreclosure case has been adjourned 4, 5, 10 times. More homeowners hold tight to their homes than a few years ago, but the cost is weeks of missed work and legal bills piled high.

Freeman N. Hawes Sr. walks into the mediation room. He's a husky, cheerful black man, from Rosedale. The bank agent nods pleasantly. She thinks the bank might grant him a mortgage modification. But she can't get the bank on the phone just now.

Perhaps next time?

The mediator sets a new date. Mr. Hawes walks to a bench and, from a brown plastic bag, pulls dog-eared letters from Nationstar Mortgage. Nationstar, the letters show, agreed that he had made his payments and promised to modify his mortgage in 2010, and again in July 2011. It broke both promises.

He has lived in Rosedale, a black middle-class neighborhood, for decades. He's edging toward 70 and holds two jobs with no plans of retiring.

''I'm not one to hold grudges,'' he says. ''The Lord says I can live 125 years, so I'll keep paying the bank. But why can't I get to the finale?''